Oh, the physical probing of his fingers yielded sensory evidence; the deep crevasses and contours that detailed his present but unseen cranium readily betrayed his age but the damning evidence remained there, in the mirror: he had no head.

The rest of his body was certainly present, looking as healthy as he had last left it before the night's rest. But the trouble came from the incomplete stump that was his neck. The length of flesh, muscle, bone, and artery came up as normal, but ended abruptly just where the flesh of the neck would have stretched out over the lower jawbone to begin to form the chin.

This was no horror show. His neck was not a bloody stump joyfully spurting blood about. It simply ended, stopped, on an unseen line. For all intents and purposes, it looked as if his neck had carried on well enough without the weight of a head to top it off.

He pondered. His sense of touch and his sense of sight disagreed, and he began to ponder if his mind had begun to unravel. The pulse of rationality was already working away within his mind, attempting to provide some sort of feasible explanation. Perhaps there was a flaw within the mirror? Perhaps there was an unseen defect within the mirror that caused it to bend inwards at a particular angle that seemed to omit his head from sight and create the illusion that there was no head, only a neck?

But... even on the random chance that such an admittedly ridiculous explanation was true, his mirror would have had to spontaneously develop the error during the night. He could clearly recall seeing himself, and, indeed, his own head, moments before he had gone to bed hours before. The sheer chance of it all struck his mind as purely impossible.

And so he stood there, gazing into the mirror, as the night hours whisked away and were slowly replaced by the coming light, and he likely would have stood there even longer after had the phone in the living room not suddenly rung.